Alto saxophonist Charles McPherson once told me that he thinks bebop is the most highly evolved form of music because once you master its intricacies, you can play anything else. Abhorrent Expanse’s second album, Enter the Misanthropocene, is a superb example of the application of death metal aesthetics to improvised music. One cannot improvise death metal; it’s a rigorously structured music that demands extraordinary skill to play. That said, what Abhorrent Expanse prove is that, somewhat in line with McPherson’s theory of bebop, a mastery of death metal allows you to improvise with those tools, and in the process create something pretty amazing. Take, for example, “Dissonant Aggressors” (its title a parody of “Dissident Aggressor”, a Judas Priest song later covered by Slayer). It begins with a thick bass boom, before the band’s two guitarists, Erik Fratzke and Luke Polipnick, improvise simultaneously in a Derek Bailey-meets-Pat Metheny (a thing that really happened) sort of way, and then drummer Tim Glenn lays down an air strike of blast beats as they continue undeterred. The album’s nearly 11-minute closing track, “Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment”, goes in an entirely different direction. It features synth and glass harmonica from Craig Taborn, a dude with impeccable jazz bona fides but a powerful love of metal, and it’s a droning, eerily atmospheric piece that seems forever building to a catharsis that never arrives, not unlike Neil Young’s Arc, the half-hour collage of feedback from his 1991 US tour. The album-opening title track does a third thing; it’s a series of noisy grindcore-ish outbursts (Polipnick’s vocals remind me of Brutal Truth’s Kevin Sharp) with Mick Barr-esque soloing, broken up by synth drones from Jesse Whitney. This music is improvised, and/but it has the discipline and aggression of death metal. Unsurprisingly, it’s left some more hidebound metalheads confused, even hostile. Judge for yourself.

Written by Burning Ambulance

For all the talk of demons and quantum physics and Lovecraft and heavy metal, how many bands can actually take you outside mundane human experience? You may love Judas Priest as much as the next person, but listening to them isn’t going to warp your sense of time and space and take you to other dimensions. Conventional song structures might just be for conventional lives.

Arriving from the Midwest by way of R’lyeh, Abhorrent Expanse‘s journey began with 2022’s Gateways to Resplendence, a stunning hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde improvised music. Now, in 2025, they’ve returned with Enter the Misanthropocene, due out August 15th, courtesy of Amalgam Music.

The title track opens the album with requisite madness. For a few seconds, dissonant death metal seems the order of the day. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that these guys are operating at a different level of madness than most. Where Imperial Triumphant are twisting their riffs into insane jazz configurations, Abhorrent Expanse are foregoing riffs altogether. Instead, they create horrifying atmospheres with pure improvisation. Blasting drums complement the stream-of-conscious guitar work the way free jazz is supposed to, only this time it’s drenched in metal.

Shortly after the first minute, the chaos grinds to a halt as an unsettling, electronic drone appears. The band then pulls back into a more menacing but somewhat quieter section, bookended by another drone, then finishing out with more brutal improv.

The unpredictability only increases from there. Much as in their last album, Abhorrent Expanse make great use of dynamics. Every passage of blast-furnace metal is complemented by the quiet and creepy. “Kairos” is an exercise in minimalist surrealism, percussive clatter, and clean guitar dancing with randomized acoustic piano. “Praise for Chaos” spends most of its time sounding like Sunn O}}} jamming with John Zorn’s Cobra.

Much of Enter the Misanthropocene specializes in this quieter yet eerie dynamic. “Nephilim Disinterred” thrives on silence, only occasional sounds interjecting into the mix. “Assail the Density Matrix” splits the difference between the soft and the loud. It’s one of the standout pieces, partially due to the fantastic bass guitar work and the sound of bells or chimes underscoring the track.

“Dissonant Aggressors” finds the aggression again. The drums furiously blast away while a Derek Bailey-esque, free jazz guitar improvises over the top. About halfway through, a wild vocal joins in, taking things into a classic Naked City/Boredoms type of vibe.

The album closes with the epic, “Prostrate Before Cthonic Devourment”. This drone-based piece is a display of awe-inspiring, doom metal power. Black Boned Angel and the aforementioned Sunn O}}} seem like relevant touchpoints, but this piece has an identity all its own. The group’s improvisational interplay gives the music greater focus, and the synthesizer contributions of guest jazz pianist Craig Taborn elevate the piece into a league all its own.

At first glance, Abhorrent Expanse seem to be doing their best to alienate both the jazz and metal crowds, too heavy for the former, too weird for the latter, but there is definitely a growing audience for such hybrid music. Maybe it’s because the metal audience is older now, giving them time to expand their musical horizons. Also, for all the good and ill of music streaming, listeners are able to experiment with genres they may have never been exposed to before, not risking wasting money on physical media that they realize they dislike only after they bring the product home. Horizons are broadening. Either way, there is a niche for Abhorrent Expanse, and they are bound to delight those who are on the hunt for this kind of album.

Written by Todd Manning for No Clean Singing

It is probably not interesting to you to know that each time I thought about starting this review, I wanted to start with the line “music is music” but my brain kept immediately jumping to humming Depeche Mode’s “People Are People.” But when I start wanting to tell you about exactly how excellent this new album from Abhorrent Expanse is, the defensive impulse is already there, because this Chicago collective exists in the liminal improvised space between free jazz and avant-garde metal. (Hence… why should it be / jazz and metal should get along so awfully?)

If we absolutely must tip this to one side of the fence or the other, I would tell you that Enter the Misanthropocene is a free jazz album made with avant-garde death metal tools, rather than an avant-garde death metal album decorated with trappings of free jazz, but these distinctions are academic and should hopefully remain subordinate to the live-wire thrill of listening to this far-reaching set of improvisations. The album came about mostly like an old-school jazz session, with all of the eleven pieces recorded in one day back in April 2022. The recording notes on Bandcamp will give you the score on who mostly played what in this four-piece ensemble – Brian Courage mostly on basses, Erik Fratzke mostly on guitars, Tim Glenn mostly on drums/percussion, and Luke Polipnick mostly on vocals/guitars – but each player is credited with such a diverse range of instrumentation that it kinda feels like they mostly picked up whatever tool felt right in each individual moment.

Abhorrent Expanse’s music, then, will certainly evoke comparisons of similar artists and ensembles who have tread those same boards where metal and jazz stumble into a Sharks vs. Jets-style rumble – John Zorn’s Naked City and Painkiller groups, Australia’s Kurushimi, Ehnahre, Neptunian Maximalism, Chaos Echoes, and so on – but the most important thing is the mongrel movement of it all: Enter the Misanthropocene grumbles and groans, it oozes and clatters and slithers and jumps from the shadows. The midsection of the opening title track, for example, with its pillowy, cymbal-free buffeting of toms, feels like Aluk Todolo interpreting Einsturzende Neubauten’s Silence is Sexy, but then the closing minute or so rockets off into free-form guitar squall and hammering drums while the upright bass tries to walk itself right out of frame.

If you’re a jazz-phobic sort looking for a foothold here, “Assail the Density Matrix” might be your easiest way in, with Tim Glenn’s flailing drums constantly speeding up and slowing down beneath waves of noise-flecked guitar and electric bass, all of it amplified by the escalating intensity of upright chimes being absolutely, well, hammered. Also grist for the frothing metalhead mill is “Dissonant Aggressors,” a two-minute sprint of frantic drums, split-channel jazz guitar splicing, and vocal tics from Polipnick that sound like Bobby McFerrin by way of Mike Patton having a seizure. But coming into this album thinking that you need to figure out how and where it is closest to “regular” metal is probably not the most productive approach, because like with so much great improvised music, the payoff here comes from watching these precarious structures form in real time, walls and support beams gliding into place at unexpected angles only to retreat back into formlessness.

With Tim Glenn ‘playing’ a squeaky door hinge on “Waves of Graves,” you might think you’ve walked onto the “Thriller” video set, but it’s woolier and wilder than that, with lightly ominous synth, high string arco bass, and Luke Polipnick’s arsenal of wordless mouth noises, from throat-singing to squeaks, pops, and phlegmy snarling. “Praise for Chaos” is a lurching drone with a whiplash death-noise coda, while “Crystal Proliferation” features clean, contemporary jazz guitar noodling that sits alongside an uneasy undercurrent of dampened, tumbling drums. The whispers, subterranean bass clanking, and rickety electric piano on “Drenched Onyx” turn the piece into a sparse and unnerving noir mood that would make an excellent score for Fritz Lang’s M. The following song, “Nephilim Disinterred,” is an even more ghostly evaporation of sound, with a tense, fluttering overlay of drones created by dragging a bow across various metals. Its six-plus minutes hang mutely in the middle distance like a sickly alien light, but they are punctuated with startling outbursts of cymbal crash and drum clatter.

The album closes with the hulking, ten-minute “Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment.” It’s a free-form sprawl of teeth-grinding drone, sculpted feedback, slow-motion guitar and bass leads, and an unpredictable pitter-pattering of drums like a pack of small animals scurrying away through a dense forest underbrush. It’s one of the pieces that feels most reminiscent of early Boris albums like Absolutego or Feedbacker. The jazz pianist Craig Taborn guests on synth and glass harmonica, the latter of which cocoons the band’s languid waves of noise in a set of otherworldly overtones, like the time-traveling lament of our future ghosts.

So yes, this entire album is an experimental collision of free jazz and avant-garde metal, but Abhorrent Expanse never feel like they want to teach you a bunch of weird chords or impress you with an audio bibliography of punishing, deep-cut citations. The vignettes they build themselves into across this wonderful album are eerie, disquieting, noisy, unpredictable, ghostly, thunderous, and honestly really just a lot of fun. Dave King’s incredible cover artwork for Enter the Misanthropocene is actually a perfect microcosm of the music: It depicts a musical score displayed sideways, with thick, aggressive streaks of oil pastels, fingerprints smudged and smeared as if exorcising some irrepressible compulsion. Whether those painterly interventions are making the music beautiful or making the music illegible is in the eye of the beholder. Music is music, right? And if you’ve ever counted yourself a fan of weird heavy metal or weird jazz, getting hit with the ol’ “Do you find this music beautiful? Can you even understand it?” is more than a rite of passage; it’s a comforting reminder that you’ve tapped into a righteous, glittering vein of productive volatility. It’s a sign that says, “Keep going.”

Written by Dan Obstkrieg for Last Rites

Ever listened to an Ornette Coleman LP and thought, “yeah, it’s okay I guess, but it could really do with some blastbeats”? If so, avant-metal weirdos Abhorrent Expanse might just have a dollop of the secret sauce you’ve been craving.

Like the band’s 2022 debut, Enter The Misathropocene was improvised live in the studio. This means that despite having songs titled ‘Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment’ and ‘Nephilim Disinterred’ there’s a distinct lack of rollicking riffs, and the band’s approach to heavy metal is more likely to leave you scratching your head than feeling compelled to whip strands of your sweaty barnet into someone else’s pint.

Things begin with a vast fetching of the guts: a chaotic, borderline vulgar blurt that suggests Aussie death metal weirdos Portal playing a stint at Cafe OTO. It’s fragmentary and barbaric but also the album’s most clear-cut ‘metal’ moment, with things only becoming more scattered and diffuse as they explode outward.

The aptly-named ‘Praise For Chaos’, for example, spends most of its run time exploring lurking, spacious drones before violently scrabbling toward the finish line with a jarring guitar workout straight out of the Mick Barr playbook. ‘Kairos’, meanwhile, sounds like a small crystal clock being kicked down the stairs, ‘Waves Of Graves’ recalls balloon animals being made in hell and ‘Dissonant Agressors’ features some pebbledashed scat (as in Scatman John, not animal shit). Elsewhere, ‘Ascension Symptom Acceleration’ takes the time to lay on some rather tasteful clarinet.

It’s bewildering, panic-inducing and frequently exhausting, but Enter The Misanthropocene is also compelling despite the discomfiture it induces. There’s a certain audacity here that should really be applauded, the band opting for interesting, esoteric pursuits over easy sonic wins. After all, when was the last time you heard glass harmonica, waterphone and bowed metals deployed alongside tangled death metal riffing and Repulsion-level velocities?

Trying to figure out how things connect ultimately feels foolish and masochistic, like tracing a soft fingertip over the cracks that spiderweb their way across a huge broken mirror. Instead, it’s better just to accept that Abhorrent Expanse exist in a realm that is beyond rational computation: a place where time folds in on itself, possibilities are endlessly refracted and the likes of Painkiller, Blind Idiot God and Imperial Triumphant weep blood while playing endless residencies for the hooting, hollering, pig-faced hoards of hell.

Written by Alex Deller for The Quietus